Return Value

A new Process that is associated with the process resource, or null if no process resource is started. Note that a new process that’s started alongside already running instances of the same process will be independent from the others. In addition, Start may return a non-null Process with its HasExited property already set to true. In this case, the started process may have activated an existing instance of itself and then exited.

Use this overload to create a new process and its primary thread by specifying its file name, user name, password, and domain. The new process then runs the specified executable file in the security context of the specified credentials (user, domain, and password).

Note

When the executable file is located on a remote drive, you must identify the network share by using a uniform resource identifier (URI), not a linked drive letter.

Note

If the address of the executable file to start is a URL, the process is not started and null is returned.

Similarly, in the same way that the Run dialog box can accept an executable file name with or without the .exe extension, the .exe extension is optional in the fileName parameter. For example, you can set the fileName parameter to either "Notepad.exe" or "Notepad". If the fileName parameter represents an executable file, the arguments parameter might represent a file to act upon, such as the text file in Notepad.exe myfile.txt.

Note

The file name must represent an executable file in the Start overloads that have userName, password, and domain parameters.

Whenever you use Start to start a process, you might need to close it or you risk losing system resources. Close processes using CloseMainWindow or Kill. You can check whether a process has already been closed by using its HasExited property..

The following code example shows the use of this overload to start an executable file and also demonstrates the throwing of a Win32Exception when an attempt is made to start an application associated with a nonexecutable file.